A Seat at the Table - is it enough? Gender, Multi party negotiations and institutional design in South Africa and Northern Ireland

In the 1990s negotiated settlements created new institutional frameworks intended to end long-standing conflicts in both South Africa and Northern Ireland. In each case, women organized as women attempted to influence those processes from the inside. This paper examines how these processes of institutional design were gendered and the impact that women organized as women (ie gender actors/activists) had on these ‘new’ institutions/ structures. Concurring with Jane Mansbridge’s (2013) recent plea for political scientists to analyse negotiations to agreement and the institutions that facilitate negotiations, this paper argues that for a greater understanding of how these processes were gendered - not only the involvement of women and gender actors and their outcomes - but also the form and structure of the negotiations themselves need analysing. As such it takes a different focus to much existing literature on settlements in NI and SA. Using a feminist institutionalist approach that sees institutions as gendered rules, norms and practices with formal and informal guises, this paper compares these two cases to expand our understanding of the gendering of negotiation processes.